Occupy Wall St. copies Arab Spring

Progressive blogs are organizing on unprecedented levels to rally support for the continuing “Occupy Wall Street” protests in New York City, using websites, photo-sharing, video-streaming and micro-blogging tools to spread the word about demonstrations.

The Occupy Wall Street protests led to the arrests of 700 people over the weekend on the Brooklyn Bridge, prompting a flurry of online support from ideological sympathizers to keep the movement going.

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Now in its 17th day, the de facto leadership of the protests lies in a body that calls itself the “General Assembly,” which The Nation, a progressive magazine, describes as “a horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified-consensus-based system with roots in anarchist thought.”

This “horizontal” mind-set finds a companion in the un-hierarchical world of the Internet, where blogs have helped to organize and mobilize demonstrators in New York City and elsewhere. The online nature of the protests has inspired copycat events that have spread as far as New Mexico, Los Angeles and Toronto.

“We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants,” explains the OccupyWallStreet.org website.

Not in New York City? Find a live video streaming of the happenings on the anti-consumerist website Adbusters. Want the details for the next event? The Twitter hashtag for demonstrations is #occupywallstreet, which features several tweets a second. Motivated by the stories? One can find stories of frustrated, down-and-out Americans on the WeAreThe99Percent Tumblr website.

In its first official declaration, the movement did not so much list demands as it did list its grievances: “no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power,” the declaration said, blaming corporations for a long list of perceived injustices, including corporate support for mortgage foreclosures, public bailouts, “colonialism,” the “torture” of “nonhuman animals” and “poison[ing] the food supply.”

One FireDogLake writer blogged about the experience of being arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. “In the end I’m glad I was arrested. This event has sparked something in me that’s been lacking since I came to university … The police may have tried to deter us, but instead they’ve impassioned us. I am one of the 99%, and I’m mad as hell,” wrote the blogger.

Blogs have also been providing material support for those camped out. The liberal blog Crooks and Liars raised $8,000 for “solidarity pizzas” that were distributed to protesters in New York, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco.